Unit 4 · Level 2 · Tools of the trade
Building a watchlist
The blockchain firehose never stops: millions of transactions a day. The analysts who extract signal don't watch everything; they curate a watchlist of maybe 20-50 addresses whose moves would change their thinking: team wallets of tokens they hold, a few credible funds, exchange cold wallets, big dormant whales. Depth beats breadth. A wallet you've watched for months tells you far more than a hundred you glanced at once.
Free to play. No ads, no token, no account needed to start.
What you get asked
What earns an address a spot on a good watchlist?
Decision-relevance is the filter. Size and fame are common reasons to ADD noise. If no move by that wallet would change what you do, it's clutter.
Match each watchlist category to why it earns its place
Each category maps to a decision: protect holdings, find ideas, read market mood, catch rare shocks. Category first, address second.
Why is a 300-address watchlist usually WORSE than a 30-address one?
Attention is your scarcest resource. Every low-relevance address you add raises the odds you're numb the day a high-relevance one moves.
A watchlist needs regular ___. Dropping addresses that went quiet or stopped being decision-relevant keeps the signal sharp.
Wallets get abandoned, labels go stale (unit 2!), and your own positions change. A watchlist is a garden, not a museum.
You hold a small token. Which single address should go on your watchlist FIRST?
Start where the risk touches YOU. Insider supply hitting an exchange is the most direct on-chain threat to a small-cap holding; everything else is context. 🐜
The rest of this unit
Explorers, watchlists, alerts and a daily loop: build your own on-chain radar.